Please be polite and considerate

Many academics engage in some sort of voluntary academic services. They might be maintaining mailing lists, doing committee work for professional organisations, or providing academic resources on their personal website like I do. If you have problems with any of these services, please remember that these academics are providing YOU a service, often in their spare time. So if you do write them, please try to be polite and considerate.

Publish or Perish technical support

Every week I receive many emails about Publish or Perish, which, remember, is FREE software that I have spent much of my spare time on in the last 12 years. Very rarely (maybe once a year), the email is a kind thank-you, expressing gratitude and encouragement and nothing more. A bit more frequently the email starts out with a brief thank-you before launching into a request for help. 90% of the questions asked are covered in the PoP FAQs or help file; 99% of the questions are covered in the PoP Book and/or PoP tutorial. So usually my responses are fairly brief and contain a simple referral to the relevant sections of these sources. But I do always respond.

How not to interact with academic volunteers?

Unfortunately, many of the emails I receive are of one of the following types:

Completely cryptic emails: "It doesn’t work" or "I have problems with Harzing" [I even have to guess they are referring to Publish or Perish], "your program has serious bugs" [usually meaning that the user hasn’t bothered to even read the 2-minute introduction and is searching incorrectly as there has never been a single bug in the program]

Angry emails: "We are all going on strike tomorrow because CNRS applies the Harzing index" [I presume they meant the Hirsch’s h-index :-)]

Direct orders: "Here’s my CV, enter my publications in the Harzing database now! You are ruining my career because my publications are not in your system." A variant is blaming me for incorrect data without realising PoP simply draws on data from Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic, CrossRef or other sources. [I am sometimes tempted to reply: If you are foolish enough to think that I sit up there at night entering millions of academic publications in a database you really shouldn’t be an academic.]

Fairly offensive emails suggesting that I intentionally exclude publications from certain countries or languages because I discriminate against them. [The simple reason that data sources such as Google Scholar (and thus Publish or Perish) don’t cover every single publication is that not all publications are available online. Sometimes the publisher has not structured their website in a standard way, so Google Scholar cannot parse it.]

Stroppy email exchanges where the recipient [invariably male] keeps implying they know better how Google Scholar and Publish or Perish works than I do, even though they seem to have been using it for 10 minutes and I have been using it every day for 12 years :-). [Sometimes I cannot help wondering: would they react the same way if my website picture had shown a guy in a suit?]

A little courtesy goes a long way

So if you want my assistance with a question to which you cannot find the answer in the PoP help file, the PoP FAQ, the PoP Book or the PoP tutorial, by all means feel free to send me an email. You will find that I am always willing to help, even if the answer can be found in these sources. But please, have the courtesy to be polite and realise that I am providing a free service to you in my spare time. And please apply the same level of consideration to other academics who engage in voluntary service to the academic community.

Anne-Wil Harzing is Professor of International Management at Middlesex University, London and visiting professor of International Management at Tilburg University. In addition to her academic duties, she also maintains the Journal Quality List and is the driving force behind the popular Publish or Perish software program.